July 15, 2015

The Future’s So Bright I Gotta Wear Shades

The latest IEEE Spectrum has a really good survey article (written by a couple of Kaiser researchers) on some of the pitfalls of augmented reality (AR) for untrained or unsuspecting users — principally distraction and obscuration. But — as always with these things — they don’t discuss the most obvious likely future abstraction, advertising — or that for many AR implementers, that distraction will be the whole point of AR. AR will primarily be used to sell you something — either directly (are you looking at a car? Oh, have we got a car for you!!) or indirectly (a lifestyle or sense of belonging).